When the day came, the locals mustered, demanding the Nazi doctor be reinstated. They even beat up the hospital administrators, to underscore the seriousness of the situation, although Ragnar didn’t put it like that. He put it like this: ‘so those mama’s boys and desk jockeys could get it into their heads once and for all how things stood.’

Ragnar’s opinion was clear. Better one wretched Nazi working for a living than that bloated red-and-white parliament and hospital-board lot.

The situation has divided the brothers. Ragnar has his views, but he holds them from the shed, where he reads his books and writes his letters on a stool next to the lathe. Kalle-Leg has the collected works of Goethe and Kierkegaard on a shelf in the low-ceilinged cobbler’s workshop. He reads Hölderlin. Rumour has it he was one of the men on the quay, a rifle resting on his knee. The rifle’s metal and the leg’s wood. The hollow cores. Fritz pictures it.

Arni is with Kalle-Leg. 135

And then there’s Jegvan. Jegvan, who was sailing during the war. Through the long, mine-sown night. Jegvan, who came home and sat with his nose towards the door, who no longer swears and gets these quick little spasms in his neck.

Jegvan was away those years the war lasted.

He left aboard a Danish trading ship shortly before the occupation. They were one of the crews who refused when the government—out of sheer pragmatism, one could see it that way—called the ships home.

Fritz knows Jegvan disembarked in Valparaiso. That later he went to New York.

He can see Jegvan now on the quay. Behind him, the skyline. And now, Jegvan on deck among silent men, men with the glow of fire in their eyes. They knead their hats against their chests, while the keel whets its way through the fragments of the convoy’s first ship.

The black, rocking wreckage.

Burning wood and screaming men, bodies sloshed against the gunwale in their component parts, a piece of thigh, a half-fried torso, and men who don’t scream, men who grab silently with their eyes at those above them, arms working mechanically in the current.

Jegvan came home but he didn’t stay long; he moved his young wife to Copenhagen.

Fritz sees his brother. The broomstick in his back. The strained calm of his hands. 136

Jegvan hates Nazis, despises the Danish parliament, yet he’s a unionist to the bone, a unionist for God, king and fatherland. He rises silently and leaves when the conversation turns to secession, to independence.

Jegvan thinks they’re playing at war up there in Klaksvík.

That they should be ashamed.

The voice is chattering on the radio. Fritz listens without listening.